"At that time his voice shook the earth; but now he has promised, 'Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.' This phrase, 'Yet once more,' indicates the removal of what is shaken--that is, creating things--so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe. For indeed our God is a consuming fire." [Hebrews 12:26-29]
There's a tune by the band Switchfoot playing in my head as I write--a song that comes back to me when I read these words from Hebrews. The opening lyric goes, "Ashes from the flame, the truth is what remains..." And then in the heart of the song, lead singer Jon Foreman belts out, "There's a fire coming that we all go through--you possess your possessions or they possess you. And if the house burns down tonight--I've got everything I need when I've got you by my side.... and let the rest burn."
Sometimes it takes the loss of everything you didn't need, in order to find out what you couldn't live with out. And in those times, maybe the thing that makes us let go of the baggage turns out to be a good and necessary--if also difficult and even painful--reality. Sometimes we need our foundations to be shaken to remind us of what we shouldn't have been treating as load-bearing in the first place. Sometimes we need the disruption of our old routines to wake us up and make us pay attention to what matters. Sometimes, we find ourselves agreeing with that line of Marilynne Robinson's narrator in Gilead, who says, "Grace is a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials."
I think that's what the Switchfoot song and the writer of Hebrews have in common here--they can look ahead to the events that shake us to our core, not with fear, but with a sense of purpose. In this passage that many of us heard read in worship this past Sunday, when God says that the heavens and the earth need to be shaken, the writer of Hebrews doesn't see that as a punishment so much as the gift of clarity--a way of removing the rubble that we shouldn't have been trying to build our lives on. Maybe we need that burning clarity more than we realize.
Times of shaking have a way of compelling us to see just who--or what--we have really put our trust in after all. If I insist that my money is not my god but still panic every time there's a sell-off in the Dow Jones, it might be a sign that I've put my trust in the stock market rather than in God. If I can no longer see the ways that my preferred political party is out of alignment with the character of God's Reign shown to us by Jesus, it may be that I have switched my allegiance to my party rather than to Jesus. If the institutions and role models I had put my trust in let me down or betray their values or sell out for popularity or power and influence, it might be the wake-up call I needed to show me where I have misplaced my confidence--and it might be what I need to get pointed back to Jesus. Those seasons of disillusionment are not fun or easy to go through, but sometimes they bring the clarity that we needed but had been afraid to face. Sometimes we need those experiences of having the unnecessary distractions burned away like dross in a refiner's fire to leave behind what is precious.
The fire of clarity can also compel us to see where we have let our faith in Jesus become just one more bit of kindling in our lives, ready to go up in smoke, and where we need to let our faith lead us in bolder and more daring directions that go to the heart of who we are. Maybe we have had to look at the places we have settled for just being "admirers" of Jesus or "fans" of his, but not "disciples." Maybe we've been forced to see that the popular "Me and My Group First" thinking that is all around us just isn't compatible with our non-negotiable call as disciples to love our neighbors and seek their good above our own convenience or comfort. And maybe--even if it's uncomfortable for the preacher to say it--we have needed someone to come along and shake us out of our complacency... and all the things we've been trying to build on that just couldn't bear the weight of what we need to endure.
Going through times like ours is never easy--and we may wish, like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, that difficult things not have to happen in our times. But maybe we can see in the difficult--and sometimes fire-like winnowing--times we have been given to live through, the gift of clarity to decide what is worth spending our lives on, and what isn't. Maybe the fire that burns the house down helps you to see that you have all you really need in the person who loves you and takes you by the hand to lead you out to safety. Maybe the earthquake that shakes the very creation to the ground shows us not to have put our trust in the Almighty Dollar, the notion of eternal abundance on the shelves at the store, or the powers of the day in the first place. Maybe we have needed all along to lose or let go of them all... so that we could find ourselves surely in the grip of an unfailing, unshakable God.
It turns out, I do believe, that being in the hands of such a God is the best possible place for us to be anyway.
Lord God, let us rest in your goodness, and then let the rest be shaken as it needs to be.
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